envied the student girls in Munich with their absurd "reform dress,"
their cigarettes and beer in cheap restaurants and theatres, their more
than doubtful standards. Although she had her own private faith and
never hesitated to pray for anything she wanted, she was not of those
that can make a career of religion; her mind and temperament were both
too complex, and she was unable to interest herself in creeds and
theologies--and congregations.

Now and again she had considered seriously the study of medicine,
architecture, law, of perfecting herself for criticism of some sort, for
she had spoken with a measure of truth when she had assured Flora that
she had no wish to marry. In her depths she was--had been--romantic and
given to dreaming, but the manifold weaknesses of her father--who had
been one of the most brilliant and accomplished of men, a graduate of
Harvard, and the possessor of many books--and the selfish and tyrannous
exactions which had tempered his enthusiasm for all things feminine, the
caustic tongue and overbearing masculinity of her uncle, who had been as
weak in his way as her father, for he had lost the greater part of his
patrimony on the stock-market, and the charming inconsequence of her
brother-in-law, who loved his family extravagantly and treated them like
poor relations, had not prepared her to idealize the young men she had
met in Rosewater and Europe. She had been sought and attracted more than
once during her years of liberty, but her prejudices and the deep cold
surface of temperament peculiar to American girls of the best class,
lent a fatal clarity of vision; and although she had studied men as
deeply as she dared, the result had but intensified the sombre threat of
the future. It was quite true that she had half-consciously believed
that hope would live again and justify itself in Elton Gwynne, and the
disappointment, at the first glimpse of his portrait, was so crushing
that she had buried her sex under an avalanche of scorn.

But scorn is far more volcanic than glacial and a poor barrier between
sex and judgment. It needed more than that, and more than disillusions
of the second class, no matter how inordinate, to give a girl the cool
reality of poise that had stimulated the curiosity of Miss Thangue; and
this Isabel had encountered, during the most critical period of her
inner life, in the beautiful city by the Isar. The experience had been
so brief and tremendous, the incidents so cro